Where are you from? I’m old enough to have been annoyed when people requested your “PIN number” (hey! number is the name! (I’ve gotten over it)), but in the context of a customer service call “pin” is obvious (at least to me). Now, the odds of remembering what my PIN is aren’t that high, but that is a separate rant.
PIN used to be an acronym for Personal Identification Number. Now, pin is just a word, still sometimes stylized as PIN, sometimes used in the phrase “pin number”. Languages change.
Of course they will. Even if they’ve not entirely sure what Pennsylvania is, they will get far more information from it than from “PA.” Because likely they will have heard something about it. People outside the United States generally know the names and something about at least a handful of states. And every time they see a new reference, that’s something that goes into the memory banks.
And you do get more meaningful information from “Worcestershire” than you might from say “WRC” if that were a used abbreviation. You might think “hey, there’s that sauce, there might be a connection.”
You can use the full word to match up things in your memory. Your brain can at the very least start an internal file on this place called “Pennsylvania.” There’s something in that word to latch on to, far more than a two-letter abbreviation. You get an idea of how to pronounce it. You can ask someone else about it. You can look it up much faster if you know what the full word is.
Not on the well-run subreddits. I frequent the SpaceX subreddit, and they’ve set up a bot to decipher the inevitable explosion of acronyms that you get in aerospace (for example).
Of course, subreddits that use acronyms/jargon as some kind of shibboleth aren’t going to do that.
Bought many a peripheral from those folks. Not to mention XPostFacto, which they hosted!
In the last election I saw numerous people get confused between Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. They both begin and end in the same letters, and Philadelphia is in Pennsylvania. For the election results, it made a difference. Biden was ahead in Philadelphia before he was ahead in Pennsylvania. Loads of people though that mean that the PA vote was Biden’s before it actually was.
MO being Missouri is also not at all obvious. Shouldn’t it be Montana, for those who’ve heard of it?
I’m assuming you misspelt Worcestershire to prove a point.
Behind the camera?
Out of the window shot, or something with shot?
MNS is also probably also some sort of shot. Major near shot?
Thanks. BTC is likely “Back to camera,” as gdave suggested. And MNS, as noted above, is very likely “Mouth not shown.”
To most of the world, the abbreviation “CA” is Canada.
One thing I pound into people whose reports I review is that the first use of any acronym or abbreviation should be spelled out and then followed by the abbreviation in parentheses, e.g. “Above Mean Sea Level (AMSL)”, even if the report has an acronym list. It just provides clarity and context for what the abbreviation means even if it common in industry. The only exceptions are the standard abbreviations of units and prefix/suffix titles, which should be obvious in context.
Stranger
Do you have the episodes themselves available to watch? If you watch the particular scene, you could probably deduce what the initialism/note means.
Do you refer to self-contained underwater breathing apparatus each time it comes up? Or the American Telephone and Telegraph Company? I suspect (2) no and (2) because scuba and AT&T were around when you were a child learning language(s), but of course anything invented or coined since one was a kid is f-ked up. 
(don hat=pedant)
- If you spell it SCUBA, you really should define it - but it has passed into common usage, so scuba is fine.
- AT&T no longer stands for American Telephone and Telegraph - they went officially to AT&T a while back.
(doff hat)
I understand your general point, but many people assume that an acronym/initialism that they are familiar with is familiar to everyone.
Sadly, I always think the same thing when our IT (information technology) group does Post Implementation Verification testing.
The IT industry still insists on calling plugs “male” and “female” depending on whether it is being inserted or having something inserted into it. So the industry itself has a dirty mind.
Dang, I don’t think I’ve heard Personal Identification Number as a phrase since the first year the phrase was introduced. It may have been the second year. But it became PIN almost immediately. I’ve certainly not heard the actual words behind the acronym in decades probably.
It’s a movie, not a series with episodes, but yes, maybe I’ll try to follow along next time I see it and figure 'em all out.
Well, it became “PIN Number”… that you’d use at “the ATM Machine.”
::sigh::
By the way, I’ve changed my ways, thanks to everyone in this thread (and a genius friend who uses “acro’s” to make people feel dumber).
I’m no longer just using US (United States:) state abbreviations without explaining them the first time. That was a total blind spot in my Americentric brain…
(“What, how can those Brits not know what an AL or an AR is? I mean, we had to figure out Man U and ARS… and of course, TOT stands for Tottenham Hotspur… oh, and ASS stands for… Saint-Étienne?”)
Re PIN: I’m very happy that I spent so long in Korea where the PIN is called 비미번호 (bi-mil beon-ho/secret number) and now in China where it’s called 身份证号码 (shēnfènzhèng hàomǎ/identification number).
The story I heard was that with interest in healthy eating becoming fashionable, they wanted to de-emphasize the “fried” part. Most people were calling it “KFC” anyway.
Can you think of better terms that are equally clear? Plugs vs sockets comes to mind, but it’s problematic because “plugs” is ambiguous (wall receptacles are often called both sockets and plugs, as in “wall plug”) while “socket” tends to imply something built in to a wall or chassis rather than something on the end of a cable. Many multi-pin connectors standardly have the pins either on the cable or on the device they plug into, depending on the type of connection. Referring to these variants as “male” and “female” is clear and succinct, IMHO.
Positive and negative would be just as clear. You can even use + and - for simplicity. Just like batteries.